It starts with a thunderstorm: cineasts will feel themselves reminded of the film classic “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” when Zerlina and Masetto, wet through, seek shelter in a haunted house and thereby burst in on the legend of Don Juan. The notorious seducer has been firing people’s imagination and drawing them under his spell since the Middle Ages. In the opera by Mozart (1756-1791) it is not only the three female leads Donna Anna, Donna Elvira and Zerlina who fall victims to his charms – the men involved also fall for his insinuating manner and are unsettled and can never be the same again.

Karoline Gruber, responsible for the staging, sees Don Giovanni as a sort of personified daemonic energy which sets something loose in people. Loosed from, convention, from prefabricated life patterns, moral considerations and emotional inhibitions – Don Giovanni actively enables them all to change their lives. His fall to Hell is therefore only a sort of stage device. In our hearts and minds we will all of us come across Don Giovanni over and over again.